This data collection was designed to test the
"incivilities thesis": that incivilities such as extant neighborhood
physical conditions of disrepair or abandonment and troubling street
behaviors contribute to residents' concerns for personal safety and
their desire to leave their neighborhood. The collection examines
between-individual versus between-neighborhood and between-city
differences with respect to fear of crime and neighborhood commitment
and also explores whether ... (more info)

This data collection was designed to test the
"incivilities thesis": that incivilities such as extant neighborhood
physical conditions of disrepair or abandonment and troubling street
behaviors contribute to residents' concerns for personal safety and
their desire to leave their neighborhood. The collection examines
between-individual versus between-neighborhood and between-city
differences with respect to fear of crime and neighborhood commitment
and also explores whether some perceived incivilities are more
relevant to these outcomes than others. The data represent a secondary
analysis of five ICPSR collections: (1) CHARACTERISTICS OF HIGH AND
LOW CRIME NEIGHBORHOODS IN ATLANTA, 1980 (ICPSR 7951), (2) CRIME
CHANGES IN BALTIMORE, 1970-1994 (ICPSR 2352), (3) CITIZEN
PARTICIPATION AND COMMUNITY CRIME PREVENTION, 1979: CHICAGO
METROPOLITAN AREA SURVEY (ICPSR 8086), (4) CRIME, FEAR, AND CONTROL IN
NEIGHBORHOOD COMMERCIAL CENTERS: MINNEAPOLIS AND ST. PAUL, 1970-1982
(ICPSR 8167), and (5) TESTING THEORIES OF CRIMINALITY AND
VICTIMIZATION IN SEATTLE, 1960-1990 (ICPSR 9741). Part 1, Survey Data,
is an individual-level file that contains measures of residents' fear
of victimization, avoidance of dangerous places, self-protection,
neighborhood satisfaction, perceived incivilities (presence of litter,
abandoned buildings, vandalism, and teens congregating), and
demographic variables such as sex, age, and education. Part 2,
Neighborhood Data, contains crime data and demographic variables from
Part 1 aggregated to the neighborhood level, including percentage of
the neighborhood that was African-American, gender percentages,
average age and educational attainment of residents, average household
size and length of residence, and information on home ownership.

Methodology

Study Purpose:
This data collection is a secondary analysis of
five other studies to test the "incivilities thesis": that
incivilities such as extant neighborhood physical conditions of
disrepair or abandonment and troubling street behaviors contribute to
residents' concerns for personal safety and their desire to leave
their neighborhood. It was designed to answer two key questions: (1)
How much variation in the fear of crime and in neighborhood commitment
arises from differences between cities or between neighborhoods versus
differences between neighbors? (2) Are some specific perceived
incivilities more relevant to fear of crime and neighborhood
commitment than others?

Study Design:
Studies were chosen for this reanalysis based on
the following conditions: (1) the areas had not been studied in
DISORDER AND COMMUNITY DECLINE IN 40 NEIGHBORHOODS OF THE UNITED
STATES, 1977-1983 (ICPSR 8944), with the exception of Atlanta, (2) the
surveys were conducted within one city or metropolitan area and
clustered residents by neighborhood, (3) the surveys included a
substantial number of people in each neighborhood, and (4) the surveys
included at least some of the same perceived incivilities. Three key
incivilities that were present across all five surveys were presence
of abandoned buildings, teens congregating, and vandalism. Litter was
a variable in all surveys save the Chicago study. These four
incivilities were chosen for inclusion in this collection.

Sample:
The following describes the sampling methods used in the
individual studies that comprise this data collection: For the Atlanta
data, a stratified random sample of Atlanta households was drawn. In
Baltimore, 30 neighborhoods were selected using stratified resampling
based on crime data from an earlier random sample of 66. The original
Chicago study employed a random sample of respondents from the Chicago
metropolitan area, including suburbs. This reanalysis used only the
urban respondents and only the neighborhoods with at least five
respondents per neighborhood. The Minneapolis-St. Paul sample was
based on three criteria: percent minority change from 1970 to 1980, an
observational measure of disorder in each commercial center, and
person crime rates for the entire commercial and residential area.
These areas were micro-neighborhoods centered around small commercial
centers. The Seattle data were based on a multistage clustered
sampling of 600 selected city blocks and immediate neighbors on these
blocks in 100 census tracts.

Data Source:

ICPSR 7951, 2352, 8086, 8167, and 9741

Description of Variables:
Part 1, Survey Data, contains measures of
residents' fear of victimization, avoidance of dangerous places,
self-protection, neighborhood satisfaction, perceived incivilities
(presence of abandoned buildings, litter, vandalism, and teens
congregating), and demographic variables such as residents' sex, age,
and education. Part 2, Neighborhood Data, contains crime data and
demographic variables from Part 1 aggregated to the neighborhood
level, including percentage of the neighborhood that was
African-American, gender percentages, average age and educational
attainment of residents, average household size and length of
residence, and information on home ownership.

Response Rates:
The survey response rate for the reanalyzed
studies was 77.3 percent in Atlanta, 66.5 percent in Chicago, 54
percent in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and 74.1 percent in Seattle. The
response rate for Baltimore was 76 percent.

Presence of Common Scales:
Several Likert-type scales were used.

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Standardized missing values.

Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Version(s)

Original ICPSR Release:1998-10-08

Version History:

2006-03-30 File CB2520.ALL.PDF was removed from any previous datasets and flagged as a study-level file, so that it will accompany all downloads.

2005-11-04 On 2005-03-14 new files were added to one
or more datasets. These files included additional setup files as well
as one or more of the following: SAS program, SAS transport, SPSS portable,
and Stata system files. The metadata record was revised 2005-11-04 to
reflect these additions.